kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

@esvrld

Rarely I've seen such amount of #bullshit about #history.

We have a long common history that dates back at least to the Roman empire. It's a convoluted history, full of wars and deaths, cultural exchanges and deep genetic mixing between all of the peoples that came and lived here during a few thousands years.

Europe has not been a single nation for long, this is true. But we have a common culture. A culture that learnt to welcome our differences.

A culture that, actually, has been corrupted by the Marshall Plan, but somehow resists in most people here.

Come and see!

You are welcome too! 😉

Did you know that #GDPR allows sites not to announce the use of "essential" cookies? Meaning those your site uses for itself, to keep the user logged in for example.

So when Internet commerce started to slap those stupid "we use cookies" banners on every site they used the more generic word "cookies" to avoid saying outright that their sites use *ad trackers*.

Long story short, if you don't sell your user data, you don't have to present stupid disclaimers.

Just trying out #element ( formerly known as Riot) and it looks pretty good, the UI has come a LONG way from the original riot application. Kudos @matthew !

quick shoutout to https://jortage.com/

"Jortage is a communal project providing object storage and hosting, with more on the way. Our model is to pool together hosting expenses of our members to allow pay-what-you-can usage and to reduce everyone's costs overall."

*whispers*

More Fedi communities for scientists about #science:

• https://lugnasad.eu - for French speaking science lovers
• https://realscience.social - for naturalists and those who appreciate evidence based science
• https://scicomm.xyz - for scientists and science enthusiasts
• https://scholar.social - for researchers, journal editors, librarians, anyone involved in academia

Why is #X11 on #Linux so complicated? Because it lets you do this https://lupyuen.github.io/pinetime-rust-mynewt/articles/wayland

• remember Netscape Navigator

• ever used any modem with a bandwidth of 28,8 or lower

• had an Early Adopter account on Livejournal

• witnessed the rise and fall of PhPBB

• witnessed the rise and fall of Napster

• used the web before Google existed

• ever used a dialup BBS site

• remember Gopher

• ever downloaded music as .mod files

• remember when about 90% of the web was made up of personal sites which were "under construction" and had pictures of people's cats on them

• remember when Yahoo was literally just a big list of websites

• know IRC commands

• have heard anyone unironically use the phrase "information superhighway"

• can recognise different bandwidth modems by what bleepy handshake sound they make

• have ever received one of those chain e-mails where you have to scroll through about a kilometre of forwarded headers only to find a "hilarious" vaguely lewd image and/or a banal list like this one

sometimes, bacteria just scoop up DNA just floating around minding its own business, and then add it to their own DNA. This is known as horizontal gene transfer, or HGT. It happens all the time, hell, bacteria have been known to occasionally become resistant to some antibiotics by STEALING GENES from OTHER SPECIES of bacteria! The tree of life isn't even a tree! We've done away with that model, it's more accurate to refer to the model as a "braided stream".

And this strange behavior isn't even unique to bacteria, there are examples of plant to plant gene transfer, plant to animal gene transfer, plant to fungus gene transfer, fungus to insect, the list goes on!

basically, the tree of life, when you zoom in close enough, really is a spectrum. The misconception of people who don't understand evolution is partially because the idea of "species" as hard coded boundaries is very natural for us. We love categories and patterns, and unfortunately for us, nature is just not as simple as we'd prefer it to be. Over both space and time, the boundaries between species is blurry. There is no "missing link" because it was always a gradual series of changes to different populations across the world to begin with. The world is a messy and complicated place, and we're all distant cousins of each other.